The Santos of Puerto Rico Gallery shares with our visitors the devotional and iconographic wealth of this Puerto Rican folk tradition and its imagery. The pieces, from a range of times and carvers, were donated to the Museo de Las Américas by Ricardo E. Alegría Gallardo (1921–2011) and his wife, Carmen Ana “Mela” Pons Castañer (1921–2016), as a way of preserving and honoring this religious, artistic, and cultural expression and fostering an appreciation of its richness as an object of historical value.

This exhibition reveals the contexts of aesthetics, woodcarving, and polychrome wood statuary within which many of the island's devotional practices emerged. The religious origins of the saints tradition on the island can be traced to the period of Spanish colonization. Missionaries used these pieces in part to catechize the indigenous peoples and later generations of Spaniards and Creoles, and that practice evolved into a deep devotional attachment to the saints, and to woodcarving, in the community and introduced, through such resources as biblical illustrations and religious prints and devotional cards, a knowledge of the rich religious iconography associated with the Catholic saints.

Today, the tradition of wooden saints is still very much alive as an artistic, cultural, and nation-affirming manifestation even more than as an expression of religious devotion. Artists across a wide range of media have been inspired by this art and have interpreted it in their own ways, drawing on the fervor for Santos to create significant works of social and political content, thereby generating an autochthonous artistic genre. These artists' gaze and the ongoing, persistent production of saints have helped to consolidate this tradition in the collective visual imaginary and in the Puerto Rican psyche and identity.

Doreen Colón Camacho